Now that White Studies has become
an academic industry, with its own dissertation mill, conference,
publications, and no doubt soon its junior faculty, it is time
for the abolitionists to declare where they stand in relation
to it. Abolitionism is first of all a political project: the
abolitionists study whiteness in order to abolish it.

Whiteness is not a culture...
Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do
with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege,
and exists for no reason other than to defend it.

Various commentators have stated
that their aim is to identify and preserve a positive white identity.
Abolitionists deny the existence of a positive white identity.
We at Race Traitor, the journal with which I am associated, have
asked some of those who think whiteness contains positive elements
to indicate what they are. We are still waiting for an answer.
Until we get one, we will take our stand with David Roediger,
who has insisted that whiteness is not merely oppressive and
false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. As James Baldwin
said, "So long as you think you are white, there is no hope
for you."

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish
culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter,
as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian,
and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture
and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing
as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and
everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection
of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it.
Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not
exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance
than big feet.

Before the advocates of positive whiteness
remind us of the oppression of the white poor, let me say that
we have never denied it. The United States, like every capitalist
society, is composed of masters and slaves. The problem is that
many of the slaves think they are part of the master class because
they partake of the privileges of the white skin. We cannot say
it too often: whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation,
it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else.

Either America is a very democratic
country, where cab drivers beat up city councilmen with impunity,
or the privileges of whiteness reach far down into the ranks
of the laboring class.

However exploited the poor whites
of this country, they are not direct victims of racial oppression,
and "white trash" is not a term of racial degradation
analogous to the various epithets commonly applied to black people;
in fact, the poor whites are the objects of race privilege, which
ties them to their masters more firmly than did the arrows of
Vulcan bind Prometheus to the rock. Not long ago there was an
incident in Boston in which a well-dressed black man hailed a
taxi and directed the driver to take him to Roxbury, a black
district. The white cab driver refused, and when the man insisted
she take him or call someone who would, as the law provided,
she called her boyfriend, also a cabdriver, on the car radio,
who showed up, dragged the black man out of the cab and called
him a "nigger." The black man turned out to be a city
councilman. The case was unusual only in that it made the papers.
Either America is a very democratic country, where cab drivers
beat up city councilmen with impunity, or the privileges of whiteness
reach far down into the ranks of the laboring class.

We are anti-white, but we are not in general
against the people who are called white. Those for whom the distinction
is too subtle are advised to read the speeches of Malcolm X.
No one ever spoke more harshly and critically to black people,
and no one ever loved them more. It is no part of love to flatter
and withhold from people what they need to know. President Samora
Machel of Mozambique pointed out that his people had to die as
tribes in order to be born as a nation. Similar things were said
at the time Afro-Americans in mass rejected the term "Negro"
in favor of "black." We seek to draw upon that tradition,
as well as - we do not deny it - an even older tradition, which
declares that a person must die so that he or she can be born
again. We hold that so-called whites must cease to exist as whites
in order to realize themselves as something else; to put it another
way: white people must commit suicide as whites in order to come
alive as workers, or youth, or women, or whatever other identity
can induce them to change from the miserable, petulant, subordinated
creatures they now are into freely associated, fully developed
human subjects.

If abolitionism is distinct
from White Studies, it is also distinct from what is called "anti-racism."

The white race is neither a biological
nor a cultural formation; it is a strategy for securing to some
an advantage in a competitive society. It has held down more
whites than blacks. Abolitionism is also a strategy: its aim
is not racial harmony but class war. By attacking whiteness,
the abolitionists seek to undermine the main pillar of capitalist
rule in this country.

If abolitionism is distinct from White
Studies, it is also distinct from what is called "anti-racism."
There now exist a number of publications, organizing programs
and research centers that focus their energies on identifying
and opposing individuals and groups they call "racist."
Sometimes they share information and collaborate with official
state agencies. We stand apart from that tendency. In our view,
any "anti-racist" work that does not entail opposition
to the state reinforces the authority of the state, which is
the most important agency in maintaining racial oppression.

The simple fact is that the public schools
and the welfare departments are doing more harm to black children
than all the "racist" groups combined.

Just as the capitalist system is
not a capitalist plot, so racial oppression is not the work of
"racists." It is maintained by the principal institutions
of society, including the schools (which define "excellence"),
the labor market (which defines "employment"), the
legal system (which defines "crime"), the welfare system
(which defines "poverty"), the medical industry (which
defines "health"), and the family (which defines "kinship").
Many of these institutions are administered by people who would
be offended if accused of complicity with racial oppression.
It is reinforced by reform programs that address problems traditionally
of concern to the "left" - for example, federal housing
loan guarantees. The simple fact is that the public schools and
the welfare departments are doing more harm to black children
than all the "racist" groups combined.

The abolitionists seek to abolish the
white race. How can this be done? We must admit that we do not
know exactly, but a look at history will be instructive.

When William Lloyd Garrison and the original
abolitionists began their work, slavery was the law of the land,
and behind the law stood the entire machinery of government,
including the courts, the army, and even the post office, which
banned anti- slavery literature from Southern mail. The slave
states controlled the Senate and Presidency, and Congress refused
even to accept petitions relating to slavery. Most northerners
considered slavery unjust, but their opposition to it was purely
nominal. However much they disapproved of it, the majority "went
along," as majorities normally do, rather than risk the
ordinary comforts of their lives, meager as they were.

The weak point of the slave
system was that it required the collaboration of the entire country,
for without the support of the "loyal citizens" of
Massachusetts, the slaveholders of South Carolina could not keep
their laborers in bondage.

The weak point of the slave system
was that it required the collaboration of the entire country,
for without the support of the "loyal citizens" of
Massachusetts, the slaveholders of South Carolina could not keep
their laborers in bondage (just as today without the support
of the law-abiding, race discrimination could not be enforced).
The abolitionists set to work to break up the national consensus.
Wendell Phillips declared that if he could establish Massachusetts
as a sanctuary for the fugitive, he could bring down slavery.
They sought to nullify the fugitive slave law, which enlisted
the northern population directly in enforcing slavery. They encouraged
and took part in attempts to rescue fugitives - not, it must
be pointed out, from the slaveholders, but from the Law. In all
of this activity, the black population took the lead. The concentrated
expression of the abolitionist strategy was the slogan, "No
Union with Slaveholders," which was not, as has often been
charged, an attempt to maintain their moral purity but an effort
to break up the Union in order to establish a liberated zone
adjacent to the slave states. It was a strategy that would later
come to be known as dual power, and neither Garrison's pacifism
nor his failure to develop a general critique of the capitalist
system should blind us to its revolutionary character.

John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry was
not an aberration but the logical application of the abolitionist
strategy. The slaveholders retaliated for it by demanding new
guarantees of loyalty from the federal government, including
a stronger fugitive slave law, reopening of the slave trade,
and especially the expansion of slavery into the territories.

The white race is a club. Certain people
are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought
up according to its rules. For the most part they go through
life accepting the privileges of membership, without reflecting
on the costs.

As Phillips said, Brown "startled
the South into madness," precipitating a situation where
people were forced to choose between abolition and the domination
of the country as a whole by the slaveholders. It was not the
abolitionists but the slaveholders who, by the arrogance of their
demands, compelled the north to resist. From Harpers' Ferry,
each step led inexorably to the next: Southern bullying, Lincoln's
election, secession, war, blacks as laborers, soldiers, citizens,
voters. The war that began with not one person in a hundred foreseeing
the end of slavery was transformed within two years into an anti-slavery
war, and a great army marched through the land singing, "As
He died to make men holy, let us fight to make men free."

The course of events can never be predicted
in other than the broadest outline, but in the essentials, history
followed the path charted by the abolitionists. As they foresaw,
it was necessary to break up the Union in order to reconstitute
it without slavery. When South Carolina announced its secession,
Wendell Phillips was forced into hiding to escape the Boston
mob that blamed him; two years later he was invited to address
Congress on how to win the war. He recommended two measures,
both of which were soon implemented: (1) declare the war an anti-slavery
war; (2) enlist black soldiers. Has ever a revolutionary been
more thoroughly vindicated by history?

The hostility of white laborers toward
abolitionism, and their failure to develop a labor abolitionism,
was not, as some have claimed, an expression of working-class
resentment of bourgeois philanthropists but the reflection of
their refusal to view themselves as part of a class with the
slaves - just as a century later white labor opposition to school
integration showed that the laborers viewed themselves more as
whites than as proletarians.

The white race is a club. Certain people
are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought
up according to its rules. For the most part they go through
life accepting the privileges of membership, without reflecting
on the costs. Others, usually new arrivals in the country, pass
through a probationary period before "earning" membership;
they are necessarily more conscious of their racial standing.

The white club does not require that all
members be strong advocates of white supremacy, merely that they
defer to the prejudices of others. It is based on one huge assumption:
that all those who look white are, whatever their reservations,
fundamentally loyal to it.

For an example of how the club works,
take the cops. The natural attitude of the police toward the
exploited is hostility. All over the world cops beat up poor
people; that is their job, and it has nothing to do with color.
What is unusual and has to be accounted for is not why they beat
up black people but why they don't normally beat up propertyless
whites. It works this way: the cops look at a person and then
decide on the basis of color whether that person is loyal to
the system they are sworn to serve and protect. They don't stop
to think if the black person whose head they are whipping is
an enemy; they assume it. It does not matter if the victim goes
to work every day, pays his taxes and crosses only on the green.
Occasionally they bust an outstanding and prominent black person,
and the poor whites cheer the event, because it confirms them
in their conviction that they are superior to any black person
who walks the earth.

On the other hand, the cops don't know
for sure if the white person to whom they give a break is loyal
to them; they assume it. The non-beating of poor whites is time
off for good behavior and an assurance of future cooperation.
Their color exempts them to some degree from the criminal class
- which is how the entire working class was defined before the
invention of race and is still treated in those parts of the
world where race, or some functional equivalent, does not exist
as a social category. It is a cheap way of buying some people's
loyalty to a social system that exploits them.

When it comes to abolishing
the white race, the task is not to win over more whites to oppose
"racism"; there are "anti-racists" enough
already to do the job.

What if the police couldn't tell
a loyal person just by color? What if there were enough people
around who looked white but were really enemies of official society
so that the cops couldn't tell whom to beat and whom to let off?
What would they do then? They would begin to "enforce the
law impartially," as the liberals say, beating only those
who "deserve" it. But, as Anatole France noted, the
law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to
sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
The standard that normally governs police behavior is wealth
and its external manifestations - dress, speech, etc. At the
present time, the class bias of the law is partially repressed
by racial considerations; the removal of those considerations
would give it free rein. Whites who are poor would find themselves
on the receiving end of police justice as black people now do.

The effect on their consciousness and
behavior is predictable. That is not to say that everyone now
regarded as "white" would suddenly become a progressive,
any more than everyone now "black" is. But with color
no longer serving as a handy guide for the distribution of penalties
and rewards, European-Americans of the downtrodden class would
at last be compelled to face with sober senses their real condition
of life and their relations with humankind. It would be the end
of race.

When it comes to abolishing the white
race, the task is not to win over more whites to oppose "racism";
there are "anti- racists" enough already to do the
job. The task is to gather together a minority determined to
make it impossible for anyone to be white. It is a strategy of
creative provocation, like Wendell Phillips advocated and John
Brown carried out.

A traitor to the white race is someone
who is nominally classified as white but who defies white rules
so strenuously as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon
the privileges of whiteness.

What would the determined minority
have to do? They would have to break the laws of whiteness so
flagrantly as to destroy the myth of white unanimity. What would
it mean to break the rules of whiteness? It would mean responding
to every manifestation of white supremacy as if it were directed
against them. On the individual level, it would mean, for instance,
responding to an anti-black remark by asking, What makes you
think I'm white? On the collective level, it would mean confronting
the institutions that reproduce race.

The abolitionists oppose all forms of
segregation in the schools, including tracking by "merit,"
they oppose all mechanisms that favor whites in the job market,
including labor unions when necessary, and they oppose the police
and courts, which define black people as a criminal class. They
not merely oppose these things, but seek to disrupt their functioning.
They reject in advance no means of attaining their goal; even
when combating "racist" groups, they act in ways that
are offensive to official institutions. The willingness to go
beyond socially acceptable "anti-racism" is the dividing
line between "good whites" and traitors to the white
race.

A traitor to the white race is someone
who is nominally classified as white but who defies white rules
so strenuously as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon
the privileges of whiteness. The abolitionists recognize that
no "white" can individually escape from the privileges
of whiteness. The white club does not like to surrender a single
member, so that even those who step out of it in one situation
can hardly avoid stepping back in later, if for no other reason
than the assumptions of others - unless, like John Brown, they
have the good fortune to be hanged before that can happen. But
they also understand that when there comes into being a critical
mass of people who look white but do not act white - people who
might be called "reverse oreos" - the white race will
undergo fission, and former whites, born again, will be able
to take part, together with others, in building a new human community.